SPRINGFIELD — Merion, Aronimink, Llanerch, they are well-known names of golf courses within Delaware County’s borders where major professional championships have been staged.

But Rolling Green Golf Club, too, once held at major professional championship, the 1976 U.S. Women’s Open. And while time may have forgotten that the William Flynn gem in Springfield provided a stiff test for the best women players of their time, it is not forgotten at Rolling Green.

Some time in 2008, Dave Staebler, the United States Golf Association’s director of rules education and a Rolling Green member, started batting around the idea of having the course again host a USGA championship with, among others, Matt Dupre, a longtime Rolling Green member as well.

A committee was formed among the membership to study the idea and it concluded that Rolling Green — which can stretch its yardage to about 6,900 yards at its maximum — would fit the USGA’s criteria for one of its championships that didn’t include the longer-hitting men, perhaps a Women’s Amateur, a men’s or women’s Senior Amateur, maybe a men’s or women’s Mid-Amateur.

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So a process was under way that would ultimately result in Rolling Green being awarded the 2016 U.S. Women’s Amateur. With the course covered in a blanket of snow two Sundays before Christmas, August of 2016 seemed far away, but for Dupre — officially the tournament’s general co-chairman along with Dana Yermish — and many of his fellow Rolling Green members, the push toward 2016 is very much on.

“The story of 1976 has always been out there, that a lot of the women thought the course was too hard,” said Dupree, who works in sales and marketing at LexisNexis, a company that provides computer-assisted legal research services. “There are some members still around who were here then, but not a lot.

“We think we have a good golf course here. Improvements have made it better. We thought this might be a good opportunity to showcase the golf course and that’s never a bad thing.”

Dupre is a New Hampshire native who went to Swarthmore. His home course as a college golfer was Rolling Green. When his professional life brought him back to the area, he joined Rolling Green 27 years ago. He has watched his sons Sam and Alex become good players through the junior program he helped develop. He is intrigued about the possibility of the best women amateur players in the world challenging the course that has become such a part of his life.

“That’s part of it,” the 53-year-old Dupre said. “You want to see how these players play certain holes compared to how you play them. I just think it will be interesting.”

Of course, Dupre and some of his like-minded fellow members had to sell the rest of the membership on the idea of giving up their golf course for a week and all the time and effort that will go into putting on such an event.

In 2010, he and his co-chair’s husband, Bob Yermish, went to the 2010 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Charlotte Country Club in North Carolina and met with the USGA’s future sites committee. A plan to bring a U.S. Women’s Amateur to Delaware County was taking shape.

Later in 2010, the idea was put to a vote among the Rolling Green membership and it was greeted with a resounding thumbs-up. An official invitation was made to the USGA to make the course available for one of its championships.

Nassau Country Club on Long Island was hoping for and got the 2014 Women’s Amateur as it will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first time it hosted the event in 1914. Rolling Green had already committed to staging the 2015 Pennsylvania Open, so that year was out.

“The USGA sent its people here and basically said they could hold a championship here tomorrow, there’s nothing that needs to be changed about the golf course,” Dupre said. “They said there are no changes necessary in the clubhouse. We sold this to our membership as a zero-sum operation. We’ll raise enough money to put on the tournament and it won’t cost any member of the club anything else.”

In November of 2012, it became official as the USGA announced that it would stage the 2016 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green.

Dupre has become a regular at the Women’s Amateur these last few summers. He visited The Country Club in suburban Cleveland — another Flynn design — for the 2012 Women’s Amateur. Last summer he was at the Country Club of Charleston in South Carolina for the first time officially representing a future Women’s Amateur site.

He discussed the event with Hall of Famer Beth Daniel, a favorite daughter of South Carolina. Daniel remembered playing Rolling Green as a young amateur in 1976 and was enthusiastic about the Women’s Amateur coming there. But she was more excited that Dupre’s son Alex, coming off a solid scholastic career at Episcopal Academy, was headed for Furman, her alma mater.

“All she wanted to do was talk to Alex about Furman and how much he was going to like it there,” Dupre said.

There is much work to do. Superintendent Charlie Carr will get an occasional visit from the USGA to see how the golf course is shaping up. Caroline Jordan will be the tournament director and she’ll be consulted regularly, although she is the championship director for the Curtis Cup Match at St. Louis Country Club in early June of 2014.

Dupre expects the course will play in the neighborhood of 6,200 yards, depending on how the conditions play out in the summer of 2016.

Since it is an amateur event, there are no corporate sponsors, but Rolling Green is forging a partnership with The First Tee of Greater Philadelphia, which Dupre sees as something that will benefit both the tournament and the local First Tee, already one of the more successful branches of the national organization.

“We’ll have a lot of their kids out here helping out as standard-bearers and things like that and the older kids can actually work as interns who can help us out with any number of duties,” Dupre said.

Fundraising is under way at the club with its 1926 Club, named for the year in which the club was founded.

Fox Sports, which earlier this year won the rights to televise the U.S. Open and the rest of the USGA championships, will be here to cover the event.

It’s a great opportunity to see a potential future star in the women’s game, as it was when Daniel played in the 1978 Women’s Amateur at Sunnybrook Golf Club in Whitemarsh, Montgomery County or when a young Michelle Wie teed it up at Philadelphia Country Club in Lower Merion in 2003.

There’s a pretty decent shot that a player from the Philadelphia area might contend and there’s precedent for that, too, since Upper Darby High product Dorothy Porter won the 1949 U.S. Amateur title at Merion’s historic East Course. A couple of PIAA champions from Delco in recent years, Jackie Calamaro, the 2009 champion from Radnor who is a member at Rolling Green, and 2010 champion Aurora Kan from Chichester, might find that Cinderella’s slipper fits just right.

Practice rounds will be Aug. 6 and 7 and the opening round of qualifying is Aug. 8. That’s 2016 and Dupre will be the first one to tell you, it will be here before you know it.